Green Grows the Holly
by Sekah
Summary: The war was lost; Odin secreted his infant son to a safe place far from the castle. Raised as a blacksmith and a huntsman, Thor is as arrogant as a king. It serves him poorly when he crosses the path of Loki, Prince of Jotunheim. Medieval AU, Thorki.
1. Grief

The babe was gone.

It gave Odin comfort despite the enemy spread before him, a thousand thousand men, as many as the stars, bordering him on every side. The undergrowth was alive with soldiers, their nickering horses and clanking metal, and farther into the valley, shouts and screams of men in combat.

Babes would die tonight, ripped from their mother's arms. They would die all over Asgard, wherever blood of Odin could be found. The orphan child secreted into his son's crib would die, too.

Laufey's eyes were on the soldiers manning the battering ram at the first gate, the Northern Gate, its stone pillars crowned by snarling heads of two dire wolves. Though his soldiers were doused with stones and arrows and the occasional vat of boiling oil or lard poured from cauldrons by starved defenders, still the ram battered, merciless. Laufey politely kept his gaze on this, the fermentation of his victory, and not his old enemy ignobly bound before him.

There was a strange camaraderie between the two men. They both knew it would come to this day. The war, so long, so cruel, could end no other way. The destruction would be absolute, whether this the ending, or Laufey lost in Odin's place.

Odin refused to weep when the first of Jotunheim's soldiers breached the hole, a few stumbling back with arrows in throats, heads, knees, but more dashing forward over their comrades' bodies, racing through the trees for plunder and glory. Men entered the keep with brandished swords and torches ablaze, the gate and its makeshift shoring torn apart by the ram. All of Odin's kinsmen, servants and guards would be killed on sight, hunted like wild beasts through the rush-matted chambers and tapestried halls. The keep would burn like hellfire, the flames licking the night, climbing the trees of the courtyard.

An infant was cast from the high walls, and fell screaming. Laufey smiled. Odin winced.

* * *

It took a day for the last survivors to be rounded up and put to the sword. Odin was beheaded in his own courtyard on an old trunk that had once held his second cousin Thea's favorite gowns. He died surrounded by scorched black rubble strewn over blood-clogged flagstones, sickened by the smell of roasted flesh and the aftermath of rape. Laufey never said a word to him. Odin, to his last breath, was thankful that it had never been in Laufey's temperament to gloat.

Castle Blair, the last defensive point of Asgard's royal line, was left in shambles. To Laufey's knowledge, and subsequent proclamation to his new territory, none now lived to claim a continuation of the line.

Jotunheim had won the war.

* * *

There was something peaceful about a forge. The bellows, the heat, the timing of it all, the tongs hooked under his arm as he beat iron against the anvil with his hammer, or used the swages, the bit. It was the hammer that was dearest to Thor: the length of rough wood hefted in his palm, the way it felt when a blow landed perfectly.

Thor's blows were damn near always perfect. He knew it, his father knew it; why, then, would his father not allow him to work with weaponry larger than a dagger or an arrowhead? They had begun to learn the making of armor, swords, lance-heads, the fine workings of war, but his father had stopped after Thor's first broadsword had gained recognition from a guild. The sword was gone, Thor knew not where. His lessons had never been completed.

That bitter recollection made Thor's face, broad and bearded, twist, and it was lucky that the cast iron pot he was creating was finished. He plunged it in the water, scowling, impervious to the hiss of billowing steam that stung his face. He resisted the urge to throw it.

"Thor." A familiar whisper of a voice, quavering with age, called him from his thoughts. Thor glanced back sullenly over a burly shoulder.

A lifetime of toil had not been easy on Carac Smith. His flesh hung from a frame that showed he had been a much bigger man, once. It was gone now, robbed by the wasting disease that threatened Carac's life. His skin was ashy and pale; today there was a strange yellow tinge to it, but Thor did not notice and Carac had no luxury like a mirror.

He leaned heavily on a staff in the doorway, blinking rheumy eyes at his adopted son.

"Father," Thor said, but stubbornly made no move to help him.

Carac had had a son of his own, but Borin had died as a lad. Not for the first time, Carac wished he hadn't treated Thor as indulgently as he had. It had given Thor a vanity that the young men and women of the town had reinforced, exacerbated.

Since the age of his apprenticeship, Thor's arrogance had been painful to watch. It would have suited him as a king, Carac thought; but Thor would never govern anyone more important than his gang of hoodlums and knaves at the local tavern, and his ill-conceived plans and tomfoolery had gotten all of them into messes that ranged from confronting the bandits in the nearby forests to insulting both the Sheriff and, worse, the Reeve of this land, all in one night.

Standing lost in thought as he was, Carac didn't notice Thor put away the pot and bank the fire until his son eased by him, still tight-lipped about something.

"Thor?"

"I go to hunt in the eastern woods, father. Get ye back to our home."

"Don't poach the deer, my son."

Disdainful as a lone wolf, Thor snorted and left, hefting a war hammer and his hunting bow, a quiver of arrows that had been fished from a corner of the smithy slung over his shoulders.

Carac tottered aside and watched the muscled back disappear down the road, Thor whistling a jaunty tune about a maiden and a beggar.

Carac sighed, and began the long limp back to his hut, where he tapped an ale cask for his afternoon inspiration. It was the gamey-eyed stranger's questions, Carac decided, that had disturbed him so. It had shaken him from his complacency like a dog from a deep slumber.

What point was there in asking whether the foundling was teething when Carac adopted him? What point to ask the color of the boy's eyes, and hair?

Quaffing ale fitfully, the old man put his feet up with a sigh, and stared out the narrow window at the filmy sun, feeling something darker than dread wind through his body.

He clutched his trencher when he fell, gasping convulsively, barely breathing. He was dead three hours by the time Thor returned to the house, a brace of conies slung over his shoulder that fell in the doorway, a knot of twisted, bloody limbs that Thor, in his grief, left there to rot for a week and a day.


	2. Ale

"I should not have left him."

"Thor, Thor," Fandral cooed.

"I should not have _left_ him," Thor muttered again into the pewter lip of his tankard, his voice anguished.

Volstagg tried to offer him a hunk of his game pie, dripping gravy down dirty fingers, but Thor shook his head dumbly, refusing. Volstagg shrugged and returned to eating with an expression like a kicked hound.

Sif, the tavern wench, walked by with an entirely new game pie, which she thrust under Thor's nose, a no-nonsense expression on her face.

"You're nursing that ale like it's mother's milk," she said bluntly, completely ignoring Thor's baleful, red-eyed glare into his beer mug. "If you don't eat, you'll drink yourself into an early grave."

"Here, here," Volstagg added, gesturing with a bit of pie crust and showering Fandral with flakey crumbs. Fandral wiped himself off daintily while quaffing his own ale, looking towards the door and not the frighteningly defeated slope of Thor's shoulders. Because of that, he was the first to notice the tavern door swing open and Hogun stalk in, grim as ever.

"Will you not leave me in peace—" Thor began wretchedly, anger and pain freezing his usually warm and boastful voice, but Hogun merely walked around the table, ignoring the others' shouts of welcome, and gripped Thor's shoulder, finally drawing Thor's bloodshot eyes from his tankard and the rough-hewn wood of the table.

To the general tavern he announced, "The royal entourage rides through our village in another rising of the moon. There will be a festival and a holiday."

Even Thor looked shocked at that. For the peasantry, a glimpse at their betters' faces was so rare it may only happen once in a lifetime, if that.

"What are they doing here?" Fandral asked wonderingly.

"We follow the bifröst," Sif guessed. "Even royalty must use the road."

An awed silence stretched until a free-ranging chicken walked into the tavern, clucking, and Volstagg rose to kick it out.

* * *

A man with gamey eyes and a forgettable face strolled down the grimy streets, horseless, well past the official city and the massive wall that marked it, a thick stone artifact from the days of the grandfathers of King Odin's grandfathers, which turned red-gold in the sinking sun. That was the cutoff point where upscale Ladygate became lowscale Diremoor. The difference was stark, now that he'd passed the Jotun's side of the city. The buildings were no longer prosperous, but clumped together and leaning on each other like old peasants who'd left their farming days beyond them, all tall and thin and rickety, firetraps, which continued down into the mire of the Stink.

The Stink was a slum. Asgardian families of twelve lived there in one-room shacks not fit for a single Jotun's goat, raised by stilts out of a swamp which the city's cartographers called Bluebell and everyone else called Swindlers.

This man's name was Coulson, and he'd grown up in one of those shacks.

Skirting peddlers and venders, beggars who grew more and more ragged and pitiful—since only ones who could not make it high enough in the Thieves Guild to secure a spot in Ladygate would beg in Diremoor—Coulson turned into a shop.

There was nothing abrupt about it. He greeted the grocer with little familiarity, browsing the stalls for all the world as if he was there to buy his family the makings for stew. He turned into a corner as if to inspect the curiously tall wall of parsnip barrels which blocked all views for those out the door, saw the grocer reach up to scratch his chin, and Coulson was ripping open the trapdoor concealed below his feet and climbing down the ladder into the crypts in moments.

* * *

They had talked politics and shop—they had gone over all the new knowledge and eventualities—and it had come to now, with operatives clustered on upturned crates in the strategic room of the rebel stronghold, kept under the Jotun's very noses.

"Are you sure he's the one?"

Recognizing that Fury needed the assurance, Coulson, all business, said again, "Carac was the right servant. He can't disguise blond hair and blue eyes, or the boy's age. Personally, with his looks and his . . . lack of foresight, I think he'll make a great figurehead."

Nick Fury's one good eye squinted. "Your opinion is unnecessary. Seek him out, Coulson. For the good of Shield."

"General," Coulson acknowledged with a quirk of his brow, and then saluted, a little late.

The dull, brave boy couldn't possibly hope to stand up to a master manipulator.

* * *

"My prince, you know, this might seem a strange idea—just truly mind-boggling—but perhaps we shouldn't have necked on your father's throne."

"It was just a bit of mischief, Lord Stark," Prince Loki laughed with a devilish smile, narrowing green eyes at his sometimes-lover.

"Mischief, well," Tony Stark said, grinning, "may we further our mischief indefinitely and do it again next week." He toasted Loki with his wine goblet, arching his eyebrows suggestively at the Prince.

Lord Stark was the son of a High Lord of Jotunheim and an Asgardian noblewoman with no royal blood. His mother had nonetheless been executed for colluding to save her family when he was a child. His father had continued on for many years, buried in his painting with nothing left to give his son, but finally perished; of a disease or a broken heart, no one knew. Baron Tony Stark had his mother's darker skin, his father's darker hair, and a smile that made the other nobles fume just looking at it.

Loki loved that smile.

His favor had kept the Stark house from falling into obscurity. Because of the Prince, Tony could pursue his writing, painting, and scientific theories unchecked. Because of the prince, Tony had everything he could have ever wanted.

And Loki, who was mercurial and tempestuous at the best of times, never let Lord Stark forget it.

"Up for a game?"

Loki's eyebrow cocked. "What kind?"

Stark snorted, stroking his beard. He'd have to play this joke carefully. "What do you mean, what kind? What kind would we play? A bedroom game, you dolt. You have to call me King."

Loki, to Stark's relief, began to snicker. "That's foul. You want me to pretend you're my father?"

"I'm actually thinking you'd be in the role of a pretty milkmaid, myself."

Loki snorted and looked away, disdainful.

Stark laughed ruefully, seeing the signs not to press this one, and collared the prince with his arm anyway to begin dragging him to his royal bedchamber, dismissing servants left and right for all the world as though he were the prince, and Loki, the Lord. Tony never had been good at denying himself.

It set Loki's teeth on edge. Abruptly, the amusement at Stark's joie-de-vivre began to seep from Loki's face. "Guards," he snapped, and Lord Stark released him with the color draining from his face. Seeing the sudden fear, Loki smiled. "I've thought of a new game, one more to my liking." He turned to Heimdall, the watch commander who now knelt before him, and gestured at his comrade. "Throw him in the dungeon. You know the room."

"I do, sir," the man said with a put-upon expression, his voice eery from a long-ago throat injury.

"We're not really going to play prisoner and torturer again, your royal badness?" Stark pleaded.

Loki just laughed. "I'll be down shortly."

As they took him away, Tony yelled over his shoulder, "You're a real royal prick, you know that?"

Loki smirked mirthlessly, turning away. "I know," he muttered, below anyone in the hall's hearing. He said it softly; he said it to himself.


End file.
